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Thursday, April 10, 2008

TurboTax Rip-Off Attempt

Talk about unethical. When you got to use TurboTax to e-file, they offer you the option to pay by credit card, or pay by deducting from your refund. That might be a nice convenience, if it didn't nick you for 2x the cost of the filing, just to have that convenience. I think a convenience charge of this magnitude is indefensible, and constitutes an ethical offense. Compounded by the fact that they make that choice the default. I'm sure they trick a fair number of people, and that is an irresistible profit-margin, I suppose.

3 comments:

One of my big gripes with QuickBooks is that they basically make it very hard to do payroll for small companies without spending $14+/month to have their payroll service. In fact, with the newer version of their software, they don't even let you do automatic paychecks where you've precalculated the tax withholding amounts--you have to enter every deduction basically by hand. It's a royal PITA.

Ouch on QuickBooks. Your comment about precalculated tax witholding reminds me of an old gripe I have, I might have even blogged in on my prior Mondegreen--why can't the W-2 witholding form include an option "I have done pro-forma analysis, and I want the IRS to simply withhold X dollars from each pay period".